btw, speaking of what FDR knew, just got done reading “in the garden of beasts”, its the true story of the ambassador FDR sent to berlin in 1933. that guy clearly called it 5 years in advance and told fdr repeatedly that the Nazi’s were absolutely insane, fully intended to start a big war, and were killing jews. apparantly FDR was one of the few people who believed the guy.
highly reccomend the book for any WW2 history buff. well written.
bonus material: the ambasadors daugher had numerous affairs with nazi’s and communists which are all well detailed.
The daughter wound up as an NKVD or GRU [ I forget which] agent.
On FDR's core feelings, I've read similar accounts along the following lines, but here is one I could put my hands on easily.
It comes from Robert Rosen's c2006 book, Saving the Jews, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust, page 13-14:
"If Roosevelt had any deep-seated prejudice, it was against Germans.
His parents had summered at the stodgy Hessian spa of Bad Nauheim to treat his father's heart disease, and the young Franklin attended German schools for five summers.
His family referred to Germans as "swine."
Father and son enjoyed mocking German speech.
'Blease expectorate me on ze dwendy ninse,' Franklin jokingly wrote his father in 1897.
During his honeymoon with Eleanor in 1903, he wrote his mother that he sat as far away as he could from the German 'pigsties.'"Like many Americans, Roosevelt had strong anti-German memories of World War I and the fight against 'the Huns'.
He kept an eye on Americans of German descent, a group not well represented among his supporters."
Another account (which I can't put my hands on right now), mentioned Roosevelt's ancestry from Holland, and sympathy for the Dutch, along with his hatred of typical German arrogance and boorishness.
In short, it is hard to imagine anyone, who could have been elected President of the United States, who felt more anti-German than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
My own ancestry is similar to Dwight Eisenhower's -- though not related, we have the same family history of escaping violence and religious persecution in Germany for freedom in America.
These were the kinds of rocks on which anti-German feelings in America were built, 70 years ago.